Determinants of crypto art adoption among Chinese consumers: an extended UTAUT2 approach

Crypto art, enabled by blockchain-based non-fungible tokens (NFTs), represents a transformative innovation in the digital art market by conferring verifiable ownership and scarcity upon digital works. While the global crypto art market has experienced substantial growth, consumer adoption in China remains nascent and poorly understood, constrained by regulatory particularities and limited empirical investigation.

This study applies the extended Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT2) to examine the determinants of crypto art adoption among Chinese consumers. Drawing on survey data from 342 respondents with prior arttransaction experience and employing structural equation modeling (SEM), we test a comprehensive model incorporating performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence, facilitating conditions, hedonic motivation, price value, and habit as predictors of behavioral intention and usage behavior.

The results indicate that performance expectancy, facilitating conditions, hedonic motivation, price value, and habit significantly and positively influence consumers' behavioral intention, whereas effort expectancy and social influence do not. Furthermore, facilitating conditions, habit, and behavioral intention directly predict actual usage behavior. The model explains 74.6% of the variance in behavioral intention and 67.3% in usage behavior.

The non-significance of social influence is consistent with the personal and private nature of crypto art consumption in China's distinctive regulatory environment. These findings yield four contributions. First, the study extends the UTAUT2 framework to the under-researched domain of crypto art. Second, the nonsignificance of social influence suggests that its predictive power may be contingent on the social visibility of consumption, the maturity of normative expectations, and the institutional framing of the technology rather than on cultural context alone. Third, we identify a dual-layer structure of habit in super-app ecosystems, distinguishing between domain-specific habit and ecosystem-level habit. Fourth, we observe boundary conditions of effort expectancy in high-involvement consumption, wherein consumers' willingness to invest cognitive resources appears to attenuate the role of perceived ease of use. These contributions extend UTAUT2 to the underresearched context of digital art consumption and offer actionable insights for platform developers, artists, and policymakers.